THEATER REVIEW; Finding Out What It's Like To Really Be Your Brother

SO much for De La Hoya versus Coley at the Garden. So much, come to think of it, for that sprawling prize fight known as Super Tuesday. The season's most exciting slugfest by far is taking place at the Circle in the Square Theater, and this one is evenly matched.

With two of America's finest young actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, squaring off in the superb new revival of Sam Shepard's ''True West,'' a clean victory is impossible to call. Which is entirely appropriate to Mr. Shepard's 1980 story of two brothers locked in an increasingly brutal and increasingly funny struggle for identity. Hey, it's family. Nobody wins.

Speaking of competitions, let's get one crucial thing out of the way. You've probably heard by now that Mr. Reilly and Mr. Hoffman are alternating in the lead roles in ''True West'': those of Austin, the ingratiating, orderly Hollywood screenwriter, and Lee, his menacing vagabond of a brother. Rest assured that no matter which performance of the production you attend, there's no way you're going to lose.

In fact, people I know who went to different single previews of this ''True West,'' which officially opened last night under the pitch-perfect direction of Matthew Warchus, have said they couldn't imagine its being cast any other way. If you've followed Mr. Hoffman's and Mr. Reilly's work on film, you probably have your own ideas of who was meant for which part. Forget it. Whichever way you've sliced it, you're right.

To see both versions of the current ''True West'' -- and if you have the time and the money, you must -- is to enrich deeply your experience of just what good actors can do with the limited instruments known as the human body and voice.

You'll wind up thinking gratefully about the respective, resonant flourishes Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Reilly bring to such activities as the smashing of a typewriter with a golf club and the buttering of a mountain of toast. Oh, and let's not forget just how these actors utter the same heavily weighted word toward the evening's end: ''Mom!'' But this cross-casting is no gimmick, no self-indulgent showcase for technique at the expense of the play itself.

On the contrary, this production makes a persuasive case for ''True West'' as a great American play, arguably Mr. Shepard's finest. The contrast of the two versions, which are similarly staged but quite different in tone, also shows the incredible variety that can be harvested from a work this fertile without betraying its essential nature.

Though ''True West,'' which follows Austin and Lee through a period of uneasy cohabitation in their absent mother's California house, is specifically anchored in time and place, it also has a primal, even eternal quality. And as funny as it is, it is equally unsettling.

True, Mr. Shepard uses his family portrait to practice some gleeful marksmanship with such familiar targets as Hollywood deal-making and the dime store illusions bred by the movies. But he also looks deeper to suggest the tenacious hold of the idea of the frontier on the American imagination and its attendant fantasies of escape.

He discredits that particular myth (the true West of the title, his characters observe sorrowfully, is long gone), just as he does that alternative American Eden, sunny, safe and nurturing suburbia. The mighty American family, however, endures in Mr. Shepard's world as a baleful pole star, just as it did in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Even though its members may try to lose themselves in the blankness of places like the Mojave Desert, they're not about to wriggle free of the stranglehold they have on one another.

Family, as Lee cheerfully points out, is the frame in which a majority of homicides take place. And though it is classically the institution that fosters and bolsters the sense of individual self against the world, for Mr. Shepard's characters, it is what gnaws away at the edges of individual identity.

The young man who returns to the decaying homestead in ''Buried Child'' famously sees his own face, in the rearview mirror of a car, dissolving into the faces of his ancestors. ''True West'' (previously best known for the fondly recalled Steppenwolf production of 1982 with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich) presents two brothers, ostensibly as opposite as yin and yang, who before the evening's end effectively become each other, although what that ''other'' happens to be is by no means certain.

There's nothing at all high-handed or obscure in the way this production brings out the existential echoes in classic sibling rivalry. While ''True West'' has its cavernous depths, for sure, it also has a surface that is as accessible and entertaining as anything this playwright ever wrote.

Mr. Warchus, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Reilly accordingly keep their audience in a state of aching laughter as Austin and Lee variously make nice, play rough, compete for the attentions of a smarmy movie producer (Robert LuPone) and turn downright homicidal. But the comedy never for an instant feels contrived; it seems to emanate as deeply from the characters' viscera as the froglike belches of the beer-swilling Lee. (Well, that's Lee as played by Mr. Hoffman.)

Mr. Reilly and Mr. Hoffman are frequently classified as actors of the same stripe. This is understandable. They are both in their early 30's and have both appeared impressively in three films by Paul Thomas Anderson, including the current ''Magnolia.'' (They each have Austin-type roles in that one.)

Yet to see these two at loggerheads in ''True West'' is to realize how different they are from each other, at least in their essential presences. Put superficially, Mr. Reilly's performances tend to develop in a straight line, a steady stream with implicit undercurrents; Mr. Hoffman's style suggests more of a squiggle, an undulating pattern of eruptions.

This is not to say one is too simple and the other too fancy. They are both equally able to surprise you. It's just that Mr. Reilly does so by stealth; Mr. Hoffman, by full-frontal attack. And their switching parts alters the basic chemistry of the play.

When Mr. Hoffman plays Austin, the respectable family man and well-paid screenwriter, and Mr. Reilly plays Lee, the renegade loner and burglar, the effect is of diametrical opposites. Mr. Reilly gives Lee a hillbilly accent and a dangerous, purposeful slowness. Mr. Hoffman's Austin is a fussy type, compulsively neat and nervous, with a smile that seems both eager and hard won.

The center of this version appears to be the actors' midriffs: Austin is forever fiddling with and tucking in his shirttails. Mr. Reilly's Lee is continually stretching his upper torso to reveal the swelling belly beneath the soiled T-shirt. These brothers are different to the point of grotesqueness, changeling siblings, so that when each starts to take on aspects of the other, it feels as elemental as a fairy tale.

Mr. Reilly's Austin and Mr. Hoffman's Lee are more clearly cut from the same genetic cloth. Their voices and diction are more alike. Granted, their metabolisms are certainly different, what with Mr. Hoffman in a continuing state of eruption and Mr. Reilly doing the slow burn to end all slow burns.

Yet you get the feeling that Lee's outlaw status is a conscious choice, just as Austin's reliability comes from a steady exertion of will. You also sense that these choices have been made by the brothers in instinctive opposition to each other. This is the version for psychologists, although any Freudian could make much of the unseen presence of the boys' nasty old father in both interpretations.

Twist my arm, and I still wouldn't be able to tell you which version of ''True West'' I prefer. There's too much wealth in each of them. Mr. Warchus, who directed the recent film version of Mr. Shepard's ''Simpatico'' as well as the Broadway hit ''Art,'' keeps the contours of the staging the same while allowing for the spontaneous detour.

He has an evocative awareness of the significance of relative postures throughout: who's vertical, who's horizontal, who's in a fetal curl, who's stretched out. Mr. Warchus also demonstrates a wonderful respect for silences, starting with the deliberately uncomfortable long pause that begins both productions, in a work that could so easily be done as a fast gallop.

Rob Howell's costumes (please note the variations here in particular) and set, a generic California living room that seems both solidly banal and sadly fragile; Brian MacDevitt's moody lighting; Jim van Bergen's sound design, with its emphasis on crickets and coyotes: all of these elements conspire to create a sense of darkness waiting to swallow everything onstage.

And by the way, ''True West'' is a four-character play, and though its other two parts are small, they are essential and, in this instance, perfectly cast. Mr. LuPone, with his too-easy, too-white smile, is the ideal human oil slick of a movie producer. And as the brothers' mother, who returns for the show's blissfully boisterous climax, Celia Weston underplays brilliantly and affectingly, when a lesser actress might have raised the roof.

Though ''True West'' is less heavy on arialike monologues than most of Mr. Shepard's work, it still has some dazzling soliloquies for both characters, including Austin's hilarious and heartbreaking account of how their father lost his teeth, twice.

Then there's Lee's rumination on family life as seen by someone looking through a window from the outside. ''Like a paradise,'' he says. ''Kinda place that sorta kills ya inside . . . Blond people movin' in and outta the rooms, talkin' to each other. Kinda place you sort of wish you grew up in, ya know?''

Of course, when you are inside, you don't feel as if you're inside. That's Mr. Shepard's point: that no one is comfortable in his own skin, his own house, his own mind. And even -- no, especially -- his own family members represent an enviable otherness.

No matter which version of this outstanding ''True West'' you see, you'll find its spiritual center in the same place. It's an image of two men leaning against a bright, orderly kitchen counter with endless night stretching behind them and one of them pausing to say to the other, ''I was wonderin' what it was like to be you.''

TRUE WEST

By Sam Shepard; directed by Matthew Warchus; set and costumes by Rob Howell; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; sound by Jim van Bergen; original music composed by Claire van Kampen; fight director, Rick Sordelet; production stage manager and associate director, William Joseph Barnes; company manager, Alan R. Markinson; production supervisor, Gene O'Donovan; associate producer, Sandi Johnson; executive producer and general manager, Roy Gabay. Presented by Ron Kastner. At the Circle in the Square, 50th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.